Slapstick on a dream landscape: love triumphs over reality in L'Herbier's tribute to the unconscious - and to movie magic. La Nuit Fantastique takes place in the unconscious of a worker, Fernand Gravey, who falls asleep and meets the woman of his dreams - Micheline Presle. For a dream woman, she is rather more inexorable than ineffable; she has the directed giddiness of a woman who, if bound to be trapped in a man's dream, is determined to at least choose the man.
The film abounds in papier-maché sets, magicians' lairs and foggy nocturnal dreamscapes. It also leaps about (lightly) on several touchy subjects for 1942; fear of imprisonment comes up in its images, and the question of who is mad and who is sane is asked repeatedly. The average person in a dream cafe is represented by a dummy, and the Louvre comes alive with frightening mummies; an audience at a magic show demands a corpse, for it is quite directly stated that there are no appropriate manners in a prison, or in a tyrant's den.